In a communication system, a user equipment needs to search for a cell after being powered on. Cell searching is a process from the user equipment being powered on to an appropriate cell being determined. Specifically, when the user equipment is powered on, it needs to search for available cells and determine an appropriate cell to register in. Only after the user equipment succeeds in registering in a cell, it can obtain information of the current cell and its neighboring cells, and monitor paging information in the network or originate a call to establish a communication connection.
An initial cell searching, as a beginning of cell searching, is to achieve downlink synchronization and to obtain information, such as a cell identification (ID) etc. Typically, the initial cell searching includes, based on a slide correlation between synchronization sequences defined by a system which are stored in a local user equipment and received signals, finding the highest correlation peaks (referred to as the highest peaks) of these synchronization sequences, comparing the highest peaks with each other to determine a particular synchronization sequence with the maximum peak value. The particular synchronization sequence corresponds to a target cell ID.
However, due to a multi-path fading environment and variance in system sampling, a correlated highest peak of the actually transmitted synchronization sequence is usually not the maximum value among the highest peaks of all the synchronization sequences, which may lead to the user equipment obtaining an erroneous cell ID. As a result, the subsequent cell searching process may be further affected, such as, cell information can not be recognized correctly, which all may lead to failure in cell searching.